The Dirty Projectors' performance Saturday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall was a puzzling test that required a good deal of audience homework be done in advance -- though I don't suspect much was.

I'll freely admit my own lack of preparation: I knew going in that this was not exactly the Dirty Projectors that won wide acclaim last year with the madly inventive album Bitte Orca, including Top 10 notices from, among others, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and yours truly. (It also landed at No. 5 on the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop survey of the nation's music critics.) Indeed, this would not be the same DPs who will undoubtedly wow (and probably perplex) devotees and newbies alike at Coachella, where they're certain to be a standout during Day 2.

It will be the same people, of course, with the group's three female vocalists -- Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian and Haley Dekle -- producing their positively witchy wailing (along with shards of heavenly harmony) while draped in different primary-colored cloaks and dresses. Bassist Nat Baldwin (on double bass at Disney Hall) will linger to the side unassumingly, following along fastidiously; drummer Brian Mcomber will thump out grooves both bafflingly polymetric and thrillingly tribal.

And at the center will stand Dave Longstreth, their tall, lanky, rubber-necked mastermind … looking like a young David Byrne blended with a younger Neil Young … singing as cracked and idiosyncratically as such a combination suggests … deftly plucking out West African figures and weirdly de-tuned what-not on a left-handed acoustic guitar wired for gut-bucket grit, like the slide riff that opens Beck's “Loser” or the crackle Cake's John McCrea creates.

In the desert, hopefully near sundown, Longstreth and his Dirty Projectors will surely focus on Bitte Orca, the rich assortment that landed them such plum Coachella billing. Saturday night at Disney Hall, however -- a gig the Brooklyn group struggled to get to, as flights west were canceled three times -- was principally devoted to the ultimate live manifestation of an earlier DPs work, The Getty Address.

It's very likely the most challenging -- but also the most personal and slow-to-gestate -- piece in Longstreth's no-longer-nascent career. I mentioned that I wasn't prepared because I hadn't heard it until two days before this earnestly rehearsed performance -- and I'd only had hours enough to listen to it twice.

That's hardly enough. This is undoubtedly music that requires a great deal more time and effort for its effect and meaning to fully take root.

It is, more or less, Longstreth's first such ambitious work, although its studio incarnation, issued in 2005 by the Dallas indie label Western Vinyl, was technically his third album under the Dirty Projectors moniker. He began work on what would become an avant-garde mini-opera for solo male (with otherworldly female chorus) while still a student at Yale at the start of the decade, inspired in part by the grander, more philosophical works of Don Henley, specifically Hotel California, “a beautiful observation of the alienation and emptiness of material culture -- only more true now than in 1976.”

Longstreth (pictured, from last June's Bonnaroo festival) wrote that description, in a letter to Henley reproduced for the evening's program, along with a fold-out libretto poster. Just days into 2005, two years after re-committing himself to the concept (he'd dropped out of Yale as well), the burgeoning then-23-year-old lauded the conscience of the Eagles (along with his Senate fight against Clear Channel) while introducing The Getty Address to the classic rocker. Makes sense why he'd want to flatter him, though sincerely: the questing protagonist of his opus is named after and embodies some of the public persona of Don Henley.

“The character is definitely not you,” Longstreth wrote, “he is based more on my brother Jake, Hernán Cortés and also Stephen Dedalus from James Joyce's book Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- but he definitely contains shades of the Eagles too.”

Think “The Last Resort” and its provocative questioning of the American Dream more than “Life in the Fast Lane” or the breakup ballad “Wasted Time,” though don't discount those songs' sense of loss and disillusion. “The album,” Longstreth told Henley, “examines the question of what is wilderness in a world completely circumscribed by highways, once Manifest Destiny has no place to go -- but in the end it is a love story.” A sort-of romance, that is, involving a Gettysburg Battlefield tour guide named Sacagawea Petrillo; the Cortés influence, meanwhile, can be detected in the Aztec symbolism of an eagle with a serpent in its beak.

Very heady, subtext-heavy stuff, and frankly even close scrutiny of Longstreth's libretto notes ahead of time wouldn't have left me fully prepped to comprehend it. He also sings in such an oddly metered way -- and Disney Hall provides such muddy acoustics for amplified voices -- that even if I knew every impressionistic lyric, I still wouldn't have been able to follow along. As it is, only the most monosyllabic vocals cut through the fascinating clutter, leaving me (and I bet others) with a strictly sensorial experience.

Which may well be Longstreth's aim. Even if so, I'm still left wondering if The Getty Address is as perfectly formed and structured as it could be.

From start to finish, in both exuberant and muted passages, it's a mesh of edgy classical, free-form (yet melodic) jazz, indie-informed funk-rock and the haunting and sometimes halting moods conjured by singular acts like Sufjan Stevens, St. Vincent and This Mortal Coil, all of whom use fractured quasi-classical elements to enhance their compositions. All of that kinetic, dramatic atmosphere (elevated by the group's female chorus, pictured left, from a May appearance with Björk in NYC) is cast adrift upon a bouillabaisse of competing rhythmic forces, girded by percussive effects ranging from ensemble handclaps and warpath tom-toms to deliberately klutzy xylophone doodles, guys blowing into beer bottles like foghorns, and sleigh-bells-plus-glockenspiel glee straight out of Brian Wilson's fantasias.

Then shoot that through with nervy uneasiness; after all, “Don Henley” is presumed to be contemplating suicide at the story's outset, before embarking on a hazily defined search for, among other things, truth, love, peace in a post-9/11 world, and an understanding of the politics of oil.

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